It is 2:37 here in Music City USA and I have been crazy productive this morning and afternoon. I wrote lesson plans and created some great resources for my class for the week. I even did a little laundry. But guess what I haven’t done?? SHOWERED! I am sure the neighbors are enjoying my wonderful bed head this morning. I think the dog is even embarrassed to go outside with me!
I am so sore from my workout yesterday! I am busting it at the gym to get ready for THE WEDDING! 151 pounds! I will be at my goal weight or below before the wedding! 27 days people! So please go buy lots of my stuff at TPT because, um, THE WEDDING is EXPENSIVE! But worth every penny!
Bedhead!
I hope you’re ready for a wild ride through my week of learning and fun. You know that some crazy stuff comes from my mind, so here we go!
Monday
This week we are moving on to the letter P! We will be celebrating the letter P with one of my favorite read alouds, Princess Pigtoria and The Pea! It’s a great story about being yourself and it’s chock full of P words! After we read about Princess Pigtoria, we will make out P hats! This week we get to wear penguin hats! Come on people, how many of you get so excited to see me wearing the letter hats?! We will also be reading our emergent reader, The Flag which introduces two new sight words: is and the. The book also uses positional words so it has a math component, too! Look at how Mr. Greg works math vocabulary and concepts into his reading blog! CLEVER!
This week our writing is going to focus on labels and labeling! I am so excited that we finally get to label our classroom! I use large Post It Notes (um, you know my fetish for Post It Notes, right?!) and each child gets to pick 1 object to label in our classroom. I say the sound of the letters and the child writes the letters. I love that the class get so into helping each other. This is another way that my students take ownership of the room. They get to see their handwriting all over the room! And let’s be honest, some of them have way better handwriting than me.
In math we are going to focus on KCC5 which is counting to answer how many. My amazing teammate, Ms. Pitts came up with this activity. You place school supplies in a bag. I am using glue stick, scissors (hopefully we won’t stab ourselves or cut anything off as we reach into the bag!), glue bottle, crayon, marker and pencil. The child pulls out one supply and we color a box on our graph. After everyone has a turn, we count our boxes to see how many of each supply we pulled out. Isn’t that super fun? We will follow that up with a graphic activity on Tuesday. Today is the day that we introduce our math journals. Math journals is one of my goals this year. I want to do a math journal entry every day to finish up our math lesson. We use the Balanced Math approach for our math instruction, so the closure is very important. My goal is to have a math journal activity to close every lesson. To help in this, I am creating math journal pages that we cut apart and glue in our math journal. After we glue it in our journal, we complete the activity. Here is what this weeks journal pages look like! Click on the picture to download your freebie!
We will also begin our remembrance of September 11th. I will read aloud the book, The Pledge of Allegiance and we will talk about what all of the words mean. We will also discuss the flag and what it means. And we will learn the song Red White and Blue by my friend Debbie Clement from Rainbows Within Reach! I think there is a beautiful book to accompany this song. I need to get the book soon! We will cap off our day with one of my favorite art projects: making the flag using our hand prints!
Tuesday
Today we will focus on patriotism and heroes. I will read aloud the book, The Star Spangled Banner and we will sing the song. Of course, we will have lots of discussions about heroes and who are heroes are. I hope to be able to guide the discussion to police officers, firefighters and military heroes. We will continue our celebration of the letter P by doing a picture sort and we will introduce rhyming words. Just the thought of rhyming words makes my muscles tense up. It is such a difficult concept for my students every year. Today we are going to start with a simple pocket chart matching activity that we do whole group. I want to get a sense of how they will do before I decide where to go with rhyming words from here. Tuesday is going to be a day when I need some of my special therapy. I hope my deodorant can handle the rhyming word challenge! We will continue to label the classroom today!
In math, we will follow up our school supply graph and count from yesterday with an independent grab, count and graph activity. Each child will have a basket of cubes. They will grab a handful and count how many cubes they have. They will color in the correct box on their graph. We will close with our math journals again today!
For our remembrance of 9/11 we will create a flag. Each child will use strips of red and white paper to make the stripes of our flag. They will attach the blue square and to make the stars, we will use q-tips dipped in white paint. Anyone want to guess whether or not we actually have fifty stars?!
Wednesday
Today we will enjoy the story If You Give A Pig A Pancake as we continue our celebration of all things P! After we read the story, we will complete our story map. And yes, I will take pictures of our story map this week. I will. I will. I will. I will try. We will also begin to generate a list of P words. After we generate our list, I will type it up and add cute clip art and place it in our writing center! We will continue our focus on labeling by completing two labeling activities. This year, I am using labeling activities from
First Grade Blue Skies! I am modifying it slightly. I will provide each student a set of words and we will cut and paste the words. As we get better with writing, we will write the words on our own.
As we continue to focus on counting to answer how many, we will take our Flippin’ Numbers activity to the next level. Each child will have a set of dot cards with 1-10. I will spin our spinner (Smart Board spinner!) and each child will have to locate the correct dot card and hold it up! This not only teaches them one to one counting and answers the how many question, it provides me a quick and easy assessment. CLEVER!!! After we finish with our flippin’ numbers, we will wrap up with our math journals! Click on the picture for your dot card freebie!
We will celebrate our patriotism today with a fun craftivity that is special for us because we live in MUSIC CITY USA! We will be using The Bubbly Blonde Teacher’s Rockin’ Out guitar craftivity to create red, white and blue guitars! It is Music City after all and we are surrounded by country music! I saw this idea on Rainbows Within Reach by my friend Debbie Clement (Debbie is going to be visiting my school in March for an author visit!!!) and just had to do it this week!
Today is also the day that our reading buddy, Bear the Dog and Ms. Leigh come to help us read!
Thursday
The letter P continues to parade in our room! P for parade, get it?! HAHA We will read the book If You Give A Pig A Party. We will discuss the story and then we will introduce our newest Thinking Map, the double bubble! We will talk about how the story today and the story from yesterday are the same and different. We will do a picture sort (I am a huge fan of the picture sorts!) that will be used as an assessment piece! We will do more labeling during our writing time.
As we continue to count to answer how many, we will play a game called Bump It! I learned of this game from a workshop led by Kim Sutton called Creative Mathematics. We will play the game two ways. First, I will spin the spinner (Hello Smart Board!) and the students will place a marker on the box with the correct number of pictures. Much like BINGO! After we play the game this way, I will pass out the numbers to match the pictures. The students will cut apart the numbers and glue them on the correct box. Hello ASSESSMENTS! That’s two assessments in one activity! CLEVER! Click the picture for your freebie!
And for our 9/11 remembrance and our discussion of patriotism, we will make this cute hat. I found it on Pinterest but I have no idea where it came from originally. If you know, please let me know! We will also make this super cute eagle! I found the eagle and the template on
Thank God It’s First Grade!Today is also the day that my amazing Kindergarten team is hosting my wedding shower. It’s a theme shower! They’re going to shower me with a special drink that starts with a V. Isn’t that fun? Everyone is asked to bring a bottle of said beverage as a gift! I am so excited! With that said, don’t expect a blog from me Thursday! Maybe a picture or two…hehe.
Friday
TGIF! We made it to Friday! We will wrap up our parade of P with the story The Piegon Wants A Puppy! I LOVE Mo Willems! He actually spoke in Nashville a while back and I totally missed it. GRRR After we read the story we will do a quick rhyming word assessment to see how we’re doing with rhyming words. This will determine how much Mr. Greg needs his “special therapy” after work! We will use pretzels and popcorn to decorate our letter P and then we can eat our P snacks!
We will assess our counting to answer how many skills by reading the story Mouse Count and then doing a cut and paste activity! Each child gets a set of mice with dots on them. They also get a set of numbers. They cut out each and glue the correct number with the correct mouse. My awesome teammate Ms. Pitts created this cute activity!
And we will snack of popcorn for our Friday Foodie snack!
Shew, that’s a busy week, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!! Besides, with no downtime, we don’t get bored which means we don’t do things we shouldn’t do and Mr. Greg stays happy!
How are you remembering September 11th in your classroom?
So, goatee or no goatee?
